How to Measure Webinar Success

There’s no right way to measure webinar success – it depends entirely on what your goals are. But with many different webinar metrics to look at, deciding what your webinar KPIs (key performance indicators) should be can be challenging. 

This guide will help you answer the question of how to measure webinar success for your own campaigns. Each guiding section has several points you can use to help find an answer suitable to you – as well as some suggestions on where scrappy marketing approaches could help turn the dial.

KPIs vs Metrics: What’s the Difference

KPIs and metrics are similar concepts but with slightly different meanings. Webinar metrics are what’s used to measure specific aspects of performance – for example, average webinar watch time or total number of attendees. 

Webinar KPIs, on the other hand, are metrics that are chosen because of their alignment with specific strategy goals. For example, if your aim is to increase webinar engagement and generate more leads, your KPIs might be audience engagement score and lead generation rate.

All KPIs are metrics – but not all metrics are KPIs. While metrics provide a range of insights across different performance factors, KPIs are what defines your strategy’s success.

Measuring Webinar KPIs: How Webinars Drive Marketing Success

Marketing success ultimately comes down to improving sales and generating revenue. That’s why webinar KPIs often relate to performance throughout the sales funnel. To find the data you  need to determine performance, though, you need to be looking in the right places. 

To get a clearer picture, use your marketing automation or CRM to investigate what touches buyers went through in their journey. Even if you don’t have a full attribution model in place, this data will give you a good indication of how you are performing. It’s also advisable to connect your CRM or marketing automation platform to your webinar software – ON24 Connect can help you do that seamlessly. 

A real-world example of this comes from Bluebeam, a software company specializing in PDF editing tools for the construction industry. Using ON24’s integration capabilities, Bluebeam was able to determine that 38% of webinar opportunities resulted in won revenue. 

Webinar performance metrics to look at when measuring impact on the sales funnel include:

• • Marketing-generated leads by both volume and weighted pipeline value – your company’s CRM will likely be the place to turn to for this information. If you don’t already mark leads as marketing-generated, export the list of opportunities your sales team is working on (including closed, lost, and open) and look to match these against your campaigns and webinars. Email addresses can often be an easy way of matching records.
  • Webinar-influenced sales-accepted leads (SALs) – assess which of the leads accepted by the sales team were influenced by a webinar.
  • Webinar-influenced marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) – look at the data within your marketing automation platform to understand how webinars are contributing to your MQL numbers. 

Some scrappy ideas for influencing webinar success metrics through the sales funnel include:

• • Run scrappy campaigns against large target accounts. If you can open a large opportunity through webinars, this will help increase marketing’s contribution to pipeline. More information is in the B2B Marketer’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing.
  • Run scrappy webinars to further qualify leads – and get sales to join the session. If you need to influence the number of leads that sales is accepting, find out what information causes them to disqualify prospects (e.g. budget) and run webinars to screen for those attributes. Use both registration fields and poll questions to collect this data – and invite your sales team to answer Q&A in the background so they will be happy to pick up those leads directly.
  • Test calls-to-action in your webinars that boost lead score. While it’s tempting to adjust your lead scoring to boost MQL numbers, that tactic won’t do anyone any favors. Instead, try to increase engagement during your webinars in a way that contributes to building a prospect’s lead score – so more of them become MQLs.

Key Webinar Engagement Metrics to Track Success

There are many ways to measure webinar engagement – from simple figures such as attendee count, through to more granular metrics such as drop-off rate. Here are a few to assess.

Add further detail: Under each metric below, add an initial content section before the current content, which is a clear definition of the metric and how it is calculated.

1. Attendees and qualified attendees

Attendees refers to the total number of people who attended your webinar and qualified attendees is the amount of those that meet your lead qualification criteria. 

This is simple – how many people watched your webinar? How many of those were qualified and fit your target prospect profile? But a word of warning – be careful that these numbers don’t become vanity metrics.

2. Engagement score

Engagement score is a single number that represents how engaged an attendee is with your webinar. This key webinar performance metric is calculated using interactions such as questions asked and polls answered.

ON24 provides a simple to understand engagement score that uses participation, engagement and use of webinar features. This number can give you a benchmark to further drive performance.

3. Resource use 

Resource use is a webinar metric that tells you how many assets an attendee interacted with. It’s calculated by tracking how many times resource materials were viewed or downloaded within the webinar console. It’s one of the most important webinar performance metrics for understanding how deeply your audience is being engaged.

4. Average viewing time

Average viewing time is the average amount of time that attendees spent watching your webinar. It’s calculated by adding together the viewing time of all attendees, then dividing by the total number of attendees. Determining how long your prospects stayed tuned into your sessions helps you understand how well your content is resonating.

Attendee feedbackAttendee feedback is a qualitative webinar metric that provides more detailed insights into attendee experience. What do attendees say about your webinars? You can poll them for this information or ask them to fill in surveys or feedback forms.

5. Repeat viewers 

Repeat viewers is the number of unique attendees who have viewed more than one webinar. It’s calculated by analyzing how many times a prospect watched any webinar session during a given period. 

If you’re looking at how to measure webinar success from an audience relevance standpoint, repeat viewers is an underrated but useful webinar KPI. It gives you a strong indication of whether audiences are enjoying your content, finding it relevant to their needs, and want to find out more.

6. Account coverage 

Account coverage tells you how broad webinar engagement is across your target accounts. It’s calculated by matching attendee data to decision-makers from key accounts to find out how many attended your webinar.

Many of these figures can be found within ON24 – as shown below. Looking at the data, we can see that while average viewing time was strong, the engagement score could be improved – as well as running some marketing to increase on-demand viewing.

There are ways to amplify webinar success – many of which only require small tweaks. To drive up your engagement score, look at increasing the number of engagement options within the session or try a different presenter. You can also:

• • Put more resources on your webinar console and signpost them during the session
  • Take polls (but wait to reveal the answers to increase average viewing time)
  • Ask for feedback in the Q&A
  • Tell attendees to sign up to the next webinar, or watch an always-on session 
  • Run campaigns for specific accounts

Webinar Promotion Metrics: How to Boost Registrations

Webinar success metrics often focus on engagement during the event and lead conversions after. That’s understandable – taking action is what you want attendees to do, after all. 

But if no one signs up to your webinar, nothing else you do matters. That’s why webinar promotion metrics are just as important as your overall webinar KPIs. 

Looking at data around sign-ups and attendance rates provides valuable clues into how well your promotional activity is working and what else you can do to gain traffic at the top of the funnel. 

To better understand promotional successes and work out how you can boost registrations, look at the following webinar metrics:

1. 1.  Registrations and qualified registrations – how many people signed up? Of those, which registrants fit your target profile?
   2. Registration to attendee conversion rate – how many of those registering actually showed up?
   3.  Cost-per-registration / cost-per-lead – if you paid to drive registrations, what was the average cost?
   4. Registration page conversion rate – what percentage of people are converting on the registration page?
   5. Conversion rate from channels – which channels are performing better than others?

Taking a scrappy approach to improving promotion-based webinar performance metrics could mean:

• • Making use of third-party sites and syndication to boost registration counts. If you need more people signing up, working with a partner that has a large audience can help.
  • Experimenting with landing page copy. What could you do to make signing up irresistible? Feel free to experiment and do something new.
  • Try different channels. If you’re stuck on using just email, change things up. Add social promotion, incentivize your sales team, get your friends to share it! As an example, Twilio used Facebook ads to boost its audience by 30% – a channel overlooked by many B2B marketers.

Using Webinar Metrics to Refine Your Strategy

Webinar metrics provide valuable insights into which parts of your strategy are working, and which aren’t. They tell you what you’re doing right and where to focus your efforts next time to see the biggest improvements. 

Using information like registration to attendee conversion rate, average viewing time and engagement scores to fine-tune your strategy will help you optimize iincrementally and achieve lasting success. For a comprehensive breakdown of best practices, check out our webinar guide.

The sooner you implement webinar KPIs and metrics into your planning, the faster you’ll see changes in your webinar success metrics. Take the time to measure, evaluate, and adjust – your strategy will only get stronger.